Brendan Gregg explains the virtualization technologies Joyent uses to run its high performance public cloud: Zones and KVM on SmartOS. He considers the performance of these technologies from the aspects of characteristics, block diagrams, internals, and results, explaining that Zones adds no overhead, whereas Xen (no longer in use at Joyent) and KVM do, which could limit network throughput to as much as a quarter of its potential. Joyent customers are therefore encouraged to deploy on Zones to ensure better performance, observability and simplicity. This may entail compiling their applications for SmartOS or, if they insist on running Linux or Windows, employing hardware virtualization (KVM).
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In its Best of Open Source Software (BOSSIE) 2010 awards, InfoWorld has recognized a number of tools for building a network, running a network, and ensuring that the network is secure. Nominees include:

Here are the categories for which 2011 Bossie Award winners have been named:

Best Open Source Software

Best Open Source Desktop and Mobile Software

Best Open Source Application Development Software

Best Open Source Data Center and Cloud Software

VirtualBox won with this endorsement: "A free-to-use and open source virtualization solution for desktop environments, VirtualBox changed hands from Sun to Oracle when the latter bought the former. That hasn't changed the pace or tenor of its development, though, and the last few revisions -- including a major update to the left of the decimal point -- have continued to pile on reasons to ditch commercial alternatives. For anyone who even dabbles in virtualization, it's gone from useful to must-have."
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If you are waiting expectantly for Oracle to move Oracle VM from Xen to KVM (Red Hat's Kernel Based Virtual Machine,) Roddy Rodstein in his blog "Oracle VM: Xen today, KVM tomorrow?" suggests that you not hold your breath. After first providing an informative history on the development of both Xen and KVM, Rodstein then cites the expert opinion of Wim Coekaerts who blogs that Oracle has no really compelling reason to make the suggested shift to KVM. So take a breath.
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Good news for the diehard fans of OpenOffice.org: Oracle will be in attendance at the ODF Plugfest in Brussels, October 14 and 15. With OpenOffice.org 3.3 now in Beta, Oracle has demonstrated its commitment to continuing support for the open source versions of its product line while fostering such contributions from the community as localization, quality assurance, porting, documentation and user experience. Oracle's investment in developing, testing, optimizing, and supporting its other open source technologies -- MySQL, GlassFish, Linux, PHP, Apache, Eclipse, Berkeley DB, NetBeans, VirtualBox, Xen, and InnoDB -- is further evidence that open source is alive and well within the Oracle camp.
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